Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/170

 104 THE CITY. BOOK III. of the Jupiter who sits near your henrtli." Medea, the enchantress, says, in Euripides, "I swear by Hecate, my protecting goddess, whom I venerate, and who in- habits this sanctuary of my heartl)." When Yirgil describes what is oldest in the religion of Rome, he shows Hercules associated with the sacred fireof Evan- der, and adored by liim as a domestic divinity. Hence came those tliousands of forms of local wor- ship among which no nnity could ever be established. Hence those contests of the gods of which polytheism is full, and which represent struggles of families, can- tons, or villages. Hence, too, that innumerable multi- tude of gods and goddesses of whom assuredly we know but the smallest part; for many have perished without even having left their names, simply because the fami- lies Mho adored them became extinct, or the cities that had adopted them were destroyed. It must have been a long time before these gods left the bosom of the families with whom they had origi- nated and who regarded them as their patrimony. "We know even that many of them never became disengaged from this sort of domestic tie. The Demeter of Eleu- sis remained the special divinity of the family of the Eumolpidce. The Athene of the Acropolis of Athens belonged to the family of the Butadae. The Potitii of Rome had a Hercules, and the Nautii a Minerva.* It appears highly probable that the worship of Venus was for a Jong time limited to the family of the Julii, and that this goddess had no public worship at Rome. It happened, iu the course of time, the divinity of a family having acquired a great prestige over the imagi- nations of men, and apjiearing powerful in proprirtion ' Livy, IX. 29. Dionysius, VI. 09.